What grinds my gears

Here in the western countries, so far, the social justice ideology has been little more than a nuisance. Sure, institutions and even governments are slowly becoming more and more totalitarian, slowly eroding human right after human right, slowly creating Orwellian totalitarian regimes where people are punished for wrongthink, and the social justice cult is seeping into the education system, being inculcated into people from an earlier and earlier age. However, so far the death toll caused by this is relatively low. But the modern racist social justice ideology is not restricted to western countries. It is, in fact, rampant in many African countries. And in many cases there it goes to absolute extremes, even destroying the economy of the entire country. Zimbabwe is, perhaps, the most famous example. For something like a century Zimbabwe was pretty much a cornucopia: It was a quite rich country, full of lush and extremely productive farmland. In fact, for decades Zimbabwe exported hu...

The 1979 movie Alien is one of the most influential and liked horror movies of all time, and helped entirely reshape and re-define a genre that's almost as old as cinema itself, and has been an enormous influence in subsequent sci-fi horror movies. It's one of those absolute masterpieces that almost completely revamped a much sillier genre, and introduced techniques and tropes that became ubiquitous. It was followed in 1986 by a direct sequel, Aliens , which is at least as influential and liked, and also introduced many tropes to the genre that greatly influenced sci-fi horror. Of course any movie franchise that's hugely popular must have video games based on it. Tons and tons of video games. But what kind of video games? The two movies are quite different. The first movie is almost purely a horror movie. A lone, effectively all-powerful and indestructible scaringly fast and nimble Lovecraftian alien creature stalks the crew of the spaceship along its long dark cor...

Finnish has no gendered third-person pronouns. There is only one third-person pronoun, used to refer to people: Hän . Like English, Finnish also has a third-person pronoun used for non-human objects or ideas, completely equivalent to the English pronoun "it": Se . In theory, hän ought to work like "he" and "she" in English, and se ought to work as "it" in English. In other words, in theory you ought to use hän when referring to people, and se when referring to objects, ideas, or other non-human things. In practice, however, that's only true for written Finnish, and extremely formal spoken Finnish. In practice, for the most part, in colloquial spoken Finnish even people are usually referred to with the pronoun se , even though it really literally means "it", and in theory ought to be used only with inanimate objects and ideas. This is a very strange quirk of colloquial Finnish. In theory, using the pronoun se , when talking...

In March of 2014, Kojima Productions published a short "preview" game called Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes . Prior to its release, the company had published a preview of the opening cinematic of the game, and it's one of the most awesome things I have seen in my entire life, in terms of ambience, visual design, and especially graphics. These were absolutely stupendous and awesome "next-gen" graphics, before they really even became a thing. The level of cinematic realism is simply mind-boggling. The video is, in fact, so good that many people thought that it was a pre-rendered animation, rather than a real-time in-game cutscene using the game engine itself. Almost nothing like this had been seen before (with a few exceptions). When the game itself was finally released, we finally got to witness that yes, they were indeed real-time graphics, not a pre-rendered full-motion video. And yes, the game itself, when the player finally gains control of the play...

"I voted numerous times, when I was a senator, to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders." - Hillary Clinton, when asked about illegal Mexican immigrants Yes, that Hillary Clinton. And no, this wasn't like 10 or 20 years ago. This was a couple of years ago, when she was starting her presidential campaign. But before Trump announced his plans to do pretty much the same thing. And she isn't the only member of the American Democratic Party to present such sentiments. I always love it when the media portrays Trump's "crackdown on illegal immigration", his firm stances for enforcing immigration laws, as something especially heinous and totalitarian, when the same narrative has been extremely common with most past American presidents. Very much including Barack Obama (you can find many speeches of his about stern measures for toughened border control and against illeg...

The two-year anniversary of the current VR headsets is quickly approaching, so it's time to once again review the market situation. As you might remember, back in 2016 VR was hyped beyond belief. The narrative was, by large, that VR is the future, and many people predicted that it would not only catch and surpass regular old gaming, but moreover actually make it obsolete. Not only would there be a plethora of new and innovative VR games, but in fact people envisioned and predicted VR headsets becoming their main display, to watch movies and TV series, browse the internet, and even play old games on a simulated giant cinema screen (after all, haven't you ever dreamed of being able to play your favorite games on a giant cinema screen?) Even prior to that the hype train was strong, with lots and lots of game companies expressing their intent to create new VR games, and adapt many of their existing games to VR. The list of games with planned VR support was relatively extensive....

A couple of posts in this series have now been about the ever-increasing blatant racism that the regressive social justice warriors are exhibiting. There is, however, another aspect of their ideology that I haven't touched much before: Misandry. The adage "all men are potential rapists" goes way back, but in recent years that sentiment has only become more and more prevalent, in many forms. Social justice warriors just love to repeat the results of a completely shoddy "study" some years back that showed that one in five female university students have been the victims of sexual assault. Even though the authors of the study themselves admitted that the study is completely flawed and shouldn't be trusted, and the number is a complete exaggeration, social justice warriors don't care. They keep repeating that number as the holy gospel. In fact, they go even further than that. You'll hear a "one in four" figure, and even a "one in thr...

Continuing the theme of things that are already being done to some extent, but which will probably be taken to ridiculous extents in the near future. Any common terms and expressions that have the word "white" in them with any sort of positive connotation, will be shunned. Likewise any such expression with the word "black" or "dark" with any sort of negative connotation. For example, calls will be done to ban the expression "white Christmas". It doesn't matter that it's a synonym for "snowy Christmas" (ie. Christmas time with lots of snow and snowy weather, the "white" referring to the color of the snow), and it doesn't matter that everybody knows that the "white" is referring to snow, it will still be demanded to be banned. Social justice warriors cannot hear or see the word "white" in any kind of positive expression without getting triggered, no matter what the word is referring to, and th...

Chuck Schumer , a member of the American Democratic Party (the "liberals", the "left", for those unacquainted with the terminology) is the senior United States senator from New York. A couple of years ago he proposed a military parade honoring the soldiers returning from Afganistan, for their services fighting against terrorism. A full-blown military parade with all bells and whistles, military bands, fly-overs, and everything. Recently Donald Trump proposed a military parade of similar magnitude pretty much for the same thing. Of course since now it's Donald Trump who is proposing a military parade, he's being compared to North Korea, and called a totalitarian dictator. And guess who is among those publicly attacking Trump for this proposal? You guessed it, Chuck Schumer himself. Who, if you already forgot it, proposed pretty much the exact same thing himself just a couple of years ago. It seems that at least he himself forgot it. To my knowledge to thi...

For a couple of decades now, and in an ever-increasing manner, the multiculturalists, and more nowadays the feminist social justice warriors, have quite clearly and expressly indicated their absolute hatred of western society and culture, and the desire to replace it with the cultures from Africa and the Middle East (and pretty much nowhere else). This has been a common sentiment among many European countries, and they have expressed this more and more openly as time has passed. For example, some time ago a parliamentarian representative in Germany, in her speech to the parliament, expressed how in about 20 years the native Germans will become a minority in the larger cities, and then she explicitly said that's a "good thing". Another politician in some kind of press conference explicitly talked about the "dehomogenization" of Germany and Europe, as a good thing, referring to immigration. As always, Sweden has been on the forefront of this sentiment. Over te...

Sometimes, especially in the case of older games, some video games have hidden cheat codes that could be entered to get all kinds of effects (such as getting infinite lives, all items, etc.) These are usually deliberately programmed into the games as some kind of easter eggs. In speedrunning, both unassisted and tool-assisted, using cheat codes are usually banned, even if the cheat code is fully supported by the game itself, and can be entered fully from within the game using normal controls. However, in general, if somebody discovers a glitch, an unintended bug in the game that can be exploited, that achieves something similar as the cheat code, or perhaps even the exact same thing, it's allowed. More particularly, some game could have a cheat code that allows you to jump to any level in the game, such as the final level. Using such a cheat code is usually banned. However, if somebody discovers a glitch in the game that can be used to jump to the final level of the game, it ...

Social justice ideologues are not only obsessed with categorizing people into different groups based on how much they think those people are being "oppressed", and giving more or less rights and privileges to those people based on how high on this hierarchy they are (sometimes even without asking any of said people if they want that!), as well as infecting and enforcing their ideology on all aspects of society, from the highest echelons of government down to individual people's lives, but they are also obsessed with infecting works of fiction with their ideology. Not content with simply creating new original works of fiction that conform to their standards, they want to change existing , long-established works in that manner. They want to take well-known and loved fictional characters, and change them. Either the character himself (and it's most often a he) is to be changed in some manner (such as suddenly turning out to be homosexual, out of nowhere), or the charac...

In the 70's and 80's Sweden was the pinnacle of a welfare state. Almost an utopia. Literacy was, of course, 100%. Basically every single person had a grade school education, and almost every single person had a high school education. Getting a university-degree education was available to basically anybody, with the help of the government. Unemployment was relatively low. Nobody had to live in poverty or on the streets. Any person in financial need could get help from the government for a home and a decent living. However, these people were the minority, and the average person lived extremely well, compared to the average in the world. In fact, the so-called "working class" for the most part lived a life of what most of the rest of the world would classify as the "middle class" (most people could afford a decently-sized house, at least one car, luxuries at home, vacations to distant countries every year, and so on.) Anybody in need of any sort of medica...

When I was attending the economics class at university, one of the very first lessons that the professor imparted on us was a quite crude-sounding hard cold fact: "What is the main purpose of a corporation? To make money." That might sound like extremely simplistic, cold and harsh, but it's true. In general, corporations are created for one purpose, and one purpose only: To make money. When company owners, and investors, put money on a corporation, they do so expecting as much profit as possible. If you invest a million dollars into a company, you'll be happy if you get $1.5 million per year back. You'll be even happier if you get $2 million back. That's why you are investing in the company in the first place. Sure, there may be a few people out there who invest in some company because of other more "altruistic" reasons, such as to help people, or for charity, or to make the world a better place in some manner. But by far the vast majority of...